Welcome to Late Night Debut! This month we feature Lisa Well’s debut essay collection, Yeah. No. Totally., published by Perfect Day Publishing in 2011. Lisa’s collection has been described as “a searing portrait of a generation on the brink.” Her essays are fearlessly personal and unpretentious explorations into the expanding interlude between adolescence and adulthood. Author John Raymond described Lisa’s collection as “a suite of nuanced, artfully sculpted think-pieces on topics from lost rock clubs to the barrios of Nicaragua, capturing more than a few subtle truths about friends and fathers along the way.”

This episode inaugurates the updated the Late Night Debut format, which now includes three acts. In the first segment, host Paul Martone covers controversial and entertaining book stories in the news. The second act features co-hosts Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch discussing Lisa’s work. In the last segment, managing editor Candace Opper catches up with Lisa, who is currently an MFA candidate in the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Lisa Wells is the author of the chapbook BEAST (poems, Bedouin Books 2012) and Yeah. No. Totally., a book of essays (Perfect Day Publishing, 2011). Her work has appeared at Omniverse, TheRumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Coldfront, Plazm Magazine, Ecotone and others. She’s received support from Caldera Arts, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Hypatia, and the Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, she currently lives in Iowa City where she holds a Provost fellowship in poetry at The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Lisa recently appeared on an episode of Late Night Conversation with Perfect Day founder Michael Heald. Click here to check it out.

About our co-hosts:

Vanessa Veselka (Portland, OR) has been at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, and a student of paleontology. Her work appears in GQ, Bitch, The Atlantic,Tin House, and Zyzzyva. Her novel Zazen won the 2012 PEN/Bingham Prize for fiction.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novel Dora: A Headcase and the anti-memoir The Chronology of Water, as well as three books of short stories. She is the founder of Chiasmus Press, and is a core faculty member of the Eastern Oregon University MFA program and an instructor at Mt. Hood Community College. She is currently finishing a three novel project. Assuming she survives it.